


i came to write a letter (but my pen was full of hymms)

by infiniteandsmall



Series: a shore, a tide (no clock, no end, transmit: transcend!) [3]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Canon, catholic!viktor, chris and viktor's wayward youth: going to a church?, he goes to mass for the aesthetic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-24 03:17:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9697286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infiniteandsmall/pseuds/infiniteandsmall
Summary: this crowded room there's a hundred ghosts/but it's your pretty green eyes that please me the most-Okay, so maybe there were a few things he had anticipated: hopping in Viktor’s shower, which he knew had excellent water pressure because Viktor never shut up about how hotel showers were so incredible inferior to his, freshening up, and then maybe making out with Viktor for like, an hour, or two, or three, lazy and slow on Viktor’s very large bed with the new mattress Viktor’d been so excited about getting because “it’s going to be so comfortable, Chris!”He had not anticipated Viktor shooing him into the bathroom and telling him to “make yourself presentable and make it snappy, Giacometti, or we’ll be late for Mass!”





	

**Author's Note:**

> me: finds the gayest, catholicest character in any piece of media and latches onto them  
> notes: super brief mentions of sex and implied drug use  
> title from seamstress by dessa, line in summary from animal love i by charlene kaye  
> viktor totally goes to church for the aesthetic! I sort of shoved orthodox and roman catholic stuff together a bit, the headscarf is something usually worn in more conservative catholic circles like I grew up in to cover a woman or girl's hair and are more common, I think, in orthodox circles. edit: in canon, Viktor would likely be russian orthodox. I don't feel comfortable playing around with a religion that isn't mind, hence the catholicism, but considering that about 70 percent of Russians identify as russian orthodox that would probably be the realistic answer!  
> also i love that pre-canon chrisvik and i now i want to write precanon yuuri/phichit in a similar vein  
> edit: apparently it's chris's birthday?? is that why that man was in my head and wouldn't let me do anything else until i finished writing this?? what a guy

Chris hadn’t anticipated that he would spend any part of his blessed off-season in a _church_.

He wasn’t sure what he had anticipated spending his off-season doing. For the hungry younger skaters who stacked their season with as many competitions as possible, the off-season wasn’t long. He was young and he was hungry.

So was Viktor. Maybe Viktor was what drew Chris to drift into St. Petersberg with a week’s worth of clothes in his bag without giving word to his coach. St. Petersberg was a nice city, especially in June when the sun never set and the gold and white of the city was lit pink all night, but it was probably Viktor. Chris had been to plenty of nice cities, but there was only one Viktor.

Okay, so maybe there were a few things he had anticipating: hopping in Viktor’s shower, which he knew had excellent water pressure because Viktor never shut up about how hotel showers were so incredible inferior to his, freshening up, and then maybe making out with Viktor for like, an hour, or two, or three, lazy and slow on Viktor’s very large bed with the new mattress Viktor’d been so excited about getting because “it’s going to be so _comfortable_ , Chris!”

He had not anticipated Viktor shooing him into the bathroom and telling him to “make yourself presentable and make it snappy, Giacometti, or we’ll be late for Mass!”

“ _Mass_?” Chris said, freezing in his tracks. “My grandma doesn’t even make me go to Mass, Viktor!”

“Don’t be a heathen!” Viktor said.

“Also, are you implying that I’m not presentable right now?” Chris said.

“You’re rumpled,” Viktor said, planting a kiss on Chris’s forehead and shutting the bathroom door in his face.

“Thanks,” Chris called through the door.

“You look cute,” Viktor said, when Chris emerged in the nicest clothes he’d brought. They were not exactly church appropriate, but that was okay. Chris was pretty sure Viktor didn’t have any concept of church appropriate, anyways: he was wearing a white button-up dotted with pink flowers that floated, sheer, over his skin, and a necklace that sat tight and collar-like around his throat.

“You too,” Chris said, crossing the room to put his hands on Viktor’s hips. Viktor wiggled slightly, praise-pleased. It had become habit where it had once been a negotiation of looks and hands and pauses to lean in and kiss the spot between Viktor’s necklace and his collarbone. Viktor got a fistful of Chris’s shirt in each hand and made a little hmming sound.

“Trying to distract me?” he said, low and breathy.

“Is it working?” Chris said.

“Nope,” Viktor chirped, grabbing Chris’s hand and pulling him out of the apartment into the pale St. Petersberg Sunday morning.

It had been worth a shot, at least.

 

They took the Metro to the cathedral. They were not Olympians. No one recognized them. The train was crowded and so Chris held on to one of the handrails, and Viktor held onto his arm, and they huddled together listening to Cascada on Viktor’s mp3 player, one earbud each. Viktor fidgeted a lot: with the mp3 player, the earbuds, with his hair. Chris was used to it, as he was used to Viktor’s preternatural pre-competition stillness. It was good to be here, to see Viktor. Chris could never predict Viktor but he could always read him: right now Viktor exuded a jittery nervous energy that looped around to bone-deep weariness.

The cathedral was large and looming and impressive and very yellow. Chris was travel-tired and couldn’t stop thinking of Viktor’s mattress, whether Viktor was also on it or not.

“Why, Viktor?” he whined, as they walked up the church steps arm-in-arm. “You’re not even religious!”

“Christoph’ya,” Viktor said, wrangling Chris’s decidedly not-Russian name into a diminutive the way he always did, putting his hand over Chris’s hand where it was tucked into the crook of Viktor’s elbow, “it’s _pretty_ in there!”

“I’m pretty, too,” Chris said.

“We can sleep on each other’s shoulders during the boring bits,” Viktor said.

“If you want to sleep, we can sleep on your very nice mattress that you never shut up about,” Chris said.

Viktor shrugged exaggeratedly. “I was planning on doing _other_ things on the mattress, but we can take a nap when we get back, sure.”

“Viktor!” Chris whined again, hanging off of Viktor’s arm.

“Relax!” Viktor said, flopping a hand at him and digging in his pockets.

He came up with a handful of lace. A few bobby pins fell from his fist and clicked as they landed on the concrete.

“What are you _doing_?” Chris said, as Viktor plucked bobby pins from the folds of the lace and stuck them into his mouth.

Viktor mumbled something incomprehensible as he spread the square of lace over his hair and started pinning it down.

“I don’t think you need to wear that,” Chris said. The church bells started ringing, echoing over the square. The little old ladies and large families that passed them gave them funny looks.

“I don’t know,” Viktor said, pulling the last bobby pin out of his mouth and examining it for a second before sticking it back into his pocket. He held out a hand to Chris.

Chris held out his own hand and let Viktor close the gap. Viktor did, and pulled Chris close, smirking under the lace.

“C’mon, Chris, we’ll be late!” Viktor said.

“Oh no-o-o, I really hope we’re not,” Chris said dryly. He rolled his eyes, but he smiled, too.

“That’s right,” Viktor said, and led him (dragged him) through the tall heavy church doors.

The church was as grand and very beautiful inside as it had looked from the outside, dripping gold and rich colors. The music was dramatic and doomy. Chris could see how Viktor might enjoy this.

He couldn’t follow much of the chanting: his Russian tended to fall more on the “where’s the bathroom?” “can you speak English?” and “condoms?” side of the spectrum. So far he hadn’t had much use for theological terms.

“Let’s light some candles,” Viktor said over the choir, not even bothering to whisper.

“Okay,” Chris said, because everything was either marble or metal in there. As long as Viktor didn’t catch anyone’s clothes on fire the worst that he would do was burn his thumbs.

Viktor turned out to be surprisingly deft at lighting his candle. He lit one for Chris, too. The flicker of the flame through red glass landed hot like a blush over Viktor’s face. Viktor pressed his hair against his chest with the flat of his hand to keep it from falling into the lit candles as he leaned forward to kiss an icon of the Blessed Virgin.  Chris saw Viktor perform all the time, slipping from ice to interview to ISU banquet. He also saw _Viktor_ , pacing hotel rooms, manic; real and solid under Chris’s hands as he came down from an orgasm gasping with his legs shaking.

Viktor’s eyes flicked up, wide under his mascaraed lashes, to the Virgin’s face: a convex dash of a nose, a gold-leaf halo glowing irregularly in the light of the candles. Chris didn’t know what this was.

“Now you,” Viktor said, soft. All around them people kissed crosses, the crucifixes of rosaries, the hands of the altar servers.

“What is with you Russians and kissing?” Chris said.

“Now you know why I’m so good at it,” Viktor said, performative cockiness over his piety for a second.

Chris kissed where Viktor had kissed.

This wasn’t the way he would’ve thought he’d spend a week in St. Petersberg, but looking over at the bright sharp lines of Viktor’s profile, he couldn’t say that he really minded. Something about Viktor looked saintish: the white lace over his light hair over his shoulders, the thoughtful slit of his eyes as he cast his face down but turned his gaze up.

Viktor caught Chris’s eye, grinned a very unsaint-like smile sideways at him as he slipped a hand into Chris’s back pocket and pulled him close so that they stood ankle-to-hip-to-shoulder and Chris _really_ didn’t mind this at all.

Viktor’s attention span for things he found uninteresting, like the priest’s sermon, was about 0.5 seconds, and so he did fall asleep with his head on Chris’s shoulder, chin tilted up towards the heavenly hosts detailed on the sky-like vault of the ceiling. The little old ladies shot Chris disapproving looks when he made no move to wake Viktor and kneel as the sermon ended and the Russian chants that Chris couldn’t understand signaled the movement to some other mysterious part of the liturgy. Chris didn’t particularly care: just leaned back against the hard wooden back of the pew and let his head rest against the top of Viktor’s and fell asleep, too.

They went home on the metro, Viktor pulling the lace from his hair in a shower of bobby pins and wrapping it around Chris’s wrist, clinging to each other in the rock-and-clack and start-and-stop of the train, listening to 60’s French pop music on Chris’s mp3 player. The noon was golden enough to get slightly champagne-drunk off it.

“Now that I’ve been to church,” Viktor said, “I have free license to be as awful as I want for the rest of the week.”

“Interesting,” Chris said.

Viktor shot him a sly glance. “I was thinking along the lines of hogging the blankets and making you do all the dishes.”

“Please,” Chris said. “I know you don’t cook.”

“Got me there,” Viktor said.

“And in regards to hogging the blankets: how much actual sleeping are you planning on doing?” Chris said.

“Not much at all,” Viktor said, grinning.

Chris didn’t remember much more of that weekend: Viktor’s mattress had been just as comfortable as he’d said it would be, and then there had been a club, and another club, and then some E, and, well.

Chris really didn’t remember much of that weekend at all. He didn’t even remember the church, when he got back to training and was swallowed up into the rush of the season.

The next year, though, Viktor looked up through his eyelashes at Chris, who stood by his coach waiting for his turn on the ice. The music for Viktor’s short program swelled, and Viktor was all gentle defiance as he swept into his routine. It was then that Viktor standing next to him with lace over his hair, face glowing against the backdrop of gold, came back in a rush. Viktor pushed himself into a quad flip like he’d never fallen before. The crowd roared.

“Nikiforov’s been working hard, hasn’t he?” Chris’s coach said.

“Yeah,” Chris said.  “Yeah, he has.”


End file.
